


the road wanting wear

by corcou



Category: Hyakujitsu no Bara | Maiden Rose
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Loyalty, M/M, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2014-11-20
Packaged: 2018-02-26 09:15:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2646512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corcou/pseuds/corcou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the day after Klaus tells Hartmann, with exquisite politeness, to go to hell that Taki shows up with the papers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the road wanting wear

It's the day after Klaus tells Hartmann, with exquisite politeness, to go to hell that Taki shows up with the papers. 

Coincidence doesn't send messengers like Azusa straightening his boots in their doorway. It sidles up to you and slits your throat, which is how Klaus feels when Taki holds out the sheets covered in his scrawl and the date-stamp of Western Alliance intelligence, like all words have been pinched at his windpipe. No excuses come out. He remembers, incongruously, making Taki fit for visitors mere minutes ago: pulling one hand at collar and the other under Taki's arm and so, a limb at a time, wrapping him into his duties. The same sequence now in reverse: Taki undoing the package and unfolding the rectangles of paper inside. Taki has, Klaus thinks, committed himself so deeply to his country's cause that the man who sometimes sleeps naked in the crook of his arm cannot be complete. Taki without insignia and obligation considers himself piecemeal, not an identity. Not so with the papers. The dispatches of Klaus' Western superiors—the mild corrections of information he's passed them, their growing suspicion that he was no longer theirs—mean little. Treason sits in his writing above his handler's signature, and Taki can see all the evidence he needs in those two lines on a quarter sheet.

Klaus tries to clear his throat. Nothing happens. As Taki steps closer, he looks similarly afflicted. Klaus can fill in the variations of _how could you do this to me_ , but he needs to hear it to be confident he's even awake, and he can only guess at the degree of betrayal he'd feel in Taki's place by compounding how he'd felt when Suguri explained the implications of Taki _Reizen_ to him. It had hit him with the eloquence of a spiraling plane. 

"Leave us," Taki says, finally. Klaus scrambles for somewhere to think. Seeing the furious downturn of Taki's mouth is not good for his mental clarity. "No, Klaus, stay," Taki adds, jerking his chin in some way that makes Azusa flee the room. 

Just him, Taki, and the elephant, then. They've been lucky in the past; there was the small matter of Hasebe and his flayed back when his loyalties were before in question, but this time they've been under house arrest for days. He would rather face a fighter squadron with his guns empty than Taki here. "Let me do something for you," Klaus says. "Please."

His master looks at him like there are no appropriate replies, which there probably aren't. The wind roars up somewhere outside as though it can lift the stress off Taki's shoulders like so many leaves. Even Klaus' eyelids feel heavy caught in the still house, in silence more painful than screaming. Kneeling is a natural extension of that weight. He shuffles forward until his lips are almost at Taki's boots.

"It gives me some happiness," Taki murmurs, the calm in his voice supernatural, "to see you recognize that some things are too much to bear, even from you."

But he doesn't draw back. His hands hang at his sides, stone in their implacability, his trousers one fluid line underneath. Something in him must vibrate so madly that in Klaus' vision it wraps back around to unmoving, and Klaus cannot meet Taki's gaze for fear any disruption will set the whole man splintering. 

"Can we talk?" Klaus asks. He glances up and his lungs are a pillar of salt; he should have let Taki compose himself first, for now he's entirely uncertain if whatever transmogrifies Taki's eyes is for himself or for his nation. In the latter case, Klaus can explain that he's misinterpreted troop strengths and written descriptions of arguments between retainers that would make Major Uemura sputter and blush. But against Taki as a person—Taki can behead him, and should have. Even were the history of Reizen knights longer, Klaus must be the most deserving.

"Not now." 

Ask later or assume a closed door? "I owe you an explanation." Couching it in terms of obligation condenses Taki to a vessel, who executes the office he has been given, focuses it to anger and not grief.

"I do not need one," Taki says. "What I need to know is what you told them, Klaus, tell me who's been injured because of you."

Klaus rears back, afraid to risk an unwelcome touch. He is shaking; they both are. Taki has a light brush to the cheek that makes the infirmary men he visits wish they had more lives to give for him. In the face of that memory, Klaus finds nothing worth saying.

"I ought to have you interrogated." Taki's voice rises in volume, but preserves the low intensity that reminds Klaus of a shortening fuse. _Yes_ , he thinks, doesn't vocalize it. "I ought to have you tried." Yes, it need not be said, Klaus would be executed the next day; that conclusion is suspended after that sentence like insects in amber. "I should have seen this coming the hour we crossed the border."

Taki's sole has been stitched in neat rows. Curious to think that someone made it by hand, and better to examine it thread by thick thread than to do the same to Taki's words.

"I am this land's lord!" Taki is not shouting with deliberation. "I am restricted and you know it. There are higher judges. I should not protect you." 

_You shouldn't have had to,_ he thinks, but again it is weak against conclusions he has also reached. His apologies settle somewhere around his roiling stomach.

"Tell me, Klaus, what have you given them. What was worth—" 

A knock cuts off the valuation of his convictions. He gets to his feet and leans against a curtain, performing the teasing Captain Klaus, because he should spare Taki's household the disgrace of having overlooked his correspondence for as long as he can. Taki opens the door and takes another message. Klaus has cheerfully misreported so many such conversations, close to lying as he can balance in his head; this time he would rather not listen at all. He has clung to Western suits, Western hair, Western courtship: how appropriate that in the one area he has tried to adopt Taki's priorities as his own, his mind sells him out.

"I have a meeting," Taki informs him. "You will be here until we're finished."

Klaus notices that he does not lock the door.

 

* * *

 

On paper it is easy to tell truths about the world. Paper flattens. It has numbers that tell you that Moriya is like Date is like Azusa, and it doesn't offer the biased judgment that only one of them might refuse to explain how he found the millstone in Klaus' things. Paper conveys the algorithmic perfection of probability, which suggests that Taki never could have discovered the tiny infidelities of Klaus' brain, and that now that he has, the cat cannot be shoved back into the bottle—or some other metaphor. Klaus has been distracted by reading over the contents of the package. When Taki returns he'll be able to accurately recite what he's told High Command. The resulting body count at least should be low even if he himself inflates it.

Suguri sweeps in behind Taki, the quintessence of fury, and Klaus drops, but Taki nods at him too and he stalks out like a hunter of large animals. Huddled on the floor, Klaus does not feel as worthy prey as usual. Dragging himself up to kneel makes him smaller than anyone his bulk should be. "Taki," he says, letting it melt slow and rich. _This is what I feel for you._ Normalcy is something that only exists on paper anyway, where he can write _I am still living with Taki, Handler_ , a constant. The physical world forces you to work where everything is unforeseen and love is a constant turning back of impossibility.

He reels off every objective fact. Perhaps there are omissions, but he doesn't think Taki, who asks for the sake of the division, cares to know that when his officers obliquely asked _what is he to you_ , he said _he is a good commander_ and nothing more, terrified of committing an immutable truth to the page. He has been fighting for Taki so long Klaus isn't himself without an uphill to struggle against.

Only one of Taki's questions is worth remembering. _And how do I know whether you're holding back?_

Then we have no foundation, he thinks. Somehow his heart's surge must show, for Taki turns away. When he wheels back around and looms over Klaus, his expression has gone through the Arctic again and returned cold and pale with control.

"Do something for me."

"Anything."

"Do you want to deliver something for me?" Taki sucks in a breath, then continues more quickly, "It's our forbidden land. Dangerous."

Klaus catches the shift to _want_ and wonders at how low he has fallen, that Taki no longer considers his every viable desire Klaus' orientation or his cravings incised down to the bone. "Anything."

"This is not an exchange," Taki says, the wrong thing entirely.

Klaus is frustrated and helpless and it is his fault, which is no excuse, but the feeling that carves through his guilt is a revelation he cannot keep silent. "Of course not. I gave up my lineage for you, my people for a thousand years. If this was an exchange, I'd have received you in return."

For a moment Klaus thinks the Wolfstadt line is about to end in a punch to his clavicle. The effort Taki uses to prevent it is very visible in the tightening of his arms, and very tender, and he has no restraint left for his voice.

"Stop," Taki says. "Stop, tell me: is this why you came from Luckenwalde, Klaus. What else did they tell you to do?"

"They didn't tell me—" He leans back away from the door until he might well have his wrists chained to his ankles, tips his throat back along with the rest of his center. A study in ritual sacrifice, offering his organs up to the sword to be dissected and pickled and tested for the pox. He's not sure if he's consciously reaching for the images or not, but Taki had an education to rival any in the Alliance, and if he cannot read a Roman arch in the spread curve of Klaus' body from solar plexus to jugular they are all forfeited fools.

Taki might swallow. He can't be certain, as he cannot see and is glad he cannot.

"Suguri will fill in details for you," Taki says. If he were not so quiet, Klaus might say he stormed out, but there's no thunder, only the protest of blood in his ears.

The excuse for banishing Klaus, as it turns out, is plausible enough presuming the trial announcement will twiddle its thumbs until he returns. The second of the Reizen's swords needs to be renewed in a shrine no one but he can travel to. The entire household is under arrest, regardless.

"The Emperor," Klaus says into Suguri's pissed mien, "can shove it if he won't let a mere item out of here. He did specify that none of our _people_ were to leave. I'm not." 

As long as he holds the title of knight, at least. It's only the purity a knight borrows from his flower that legitimizes him to touch the sword, although he appreciates that his legal classification would be more generous if he were in a body bag than alive and wrestling for focus. That paradox, worth more dead than alive, is flimsy as rationales go. But neither of them will say that this is how Taki tests loyalties—entrusting more to the subjects of greater doubt, so the pressure itself will either run you ragged to prove yourself or break you.

The last thing Taki says before waving him off, breaking away from a knot of advisors to maintain a pretense of friendliness, is _There will likely be someone waiting in ambush_. Right up against his neck as though sharing a child's secret.

**Author's Note:**

> ABANDONED WIP
> 
>  
> 
> Any good ideas still apparent are from undomielregina, mastermind extraordinaire.


End file.
